It will be appreciated that in air defense systems, an incoming missile is countermeasured through the utilization of an interceptor missile, which is guided towards the incoming missile through attitude control and millimeter wave radar techniques. In order to be able to intercept an incoming missile with current attitude adjusting technology, it is important to be able to transmit millimeter radar signals in hundreds of frequency channels so that the frequency can be hopped amongst channels to avoid jamming. Moreover, it is important that these frequencies be selectable and available through a switching system in which the transmit frequency can be set rapidly.
In the past, master frequency generators have been employed utilizing a large number of base frequencies or tones in order to be able to synthesize the required channel. In one application, as many as 16 tones were necessary in order to generate the required frequencies with the required spectral purity. In addition to generating the 16 tones, multipliers, and dividers, mixers were combined to provide the large number of frequencies required. For instance, in one application, 100 channels are needed to be generated. The result of such a master frequency generator was that the number of parts necessary was excessive, which both added weight and resulted in high power consumption in an application, which because of its intended use, must be extremely lightweight and extremely parsimonious in its power consumption.
In general, for interceptor missiles, it is the kinetic energy of the missile that takes out the incoming missile, as opposed to explosives that utilize proximity fuses to be able to accomplish the task. Thus, it is desirable to minimize the mass of the components in the missile to be able to maximize the velocity. This is because the energy in the collision is proportional to the square of the velocity. The number of components also obviously adds considerably to the cost of the entire system, such that any system that can minimize the parts count is desirable.
In the interceptor missile application, as mentioned before, it is a requirement to generate hundreds of channel frequencies and to be able to hop between frequencies to avoid jamming. Secondly, channels permit profiling the incoming missile as to its attitude or orientation, as well as its physical characteristics, to determine the most lethal point of impact, and this requires hundreds of channels.